Latest news with #Longworth
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Karina Longworth on Late Style, Unfashionable Auteurs and Season 20 of Her Film History Podcast ‘You Must Remember This'
Late style can seem like a safe haven for the modern movie lover. Whether its the sparse styling of Clint Eastwood's 'Juror #2' or the multi-million-dollar gonzo flair of Francis Ford Coppola's 'Megalopolis,' there's a vital, existential intrigue to directors who may seem over the hill, or encased in amber, and who can be easily dismissed as unfashionable. 'Nobody will admit that about Clint Eastwood though! Everybody on the internet is a Clint auteurist,' Karina Longworth says, chuckling. The film historian and former critic has been the writer and host of her podcast 'You Must Remember This' since 2014. 'It was definitely that in terms of 'Megalopolis.' … It is very easy to write off Coppola as a rich old man who doesn't have to answer to anyone but himself and to say that that's a problem. But the out-of-timeness, looking backwards and forwards, is what's exciting about it.' More from Variety Cynthia Erivo to Narrate New 'Wicked' Audiobook Jessie Buckley to Narrate Leah Hazard's Novel 'The Anatomy of Us' for Audible (EXCLUSIVE) 'Contagion' Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns Asks AI to Write a Sequel to Pandemic Film in Audible Original Series 'What Could Go Wrong?' - and He's Stunned by the Results For the latest season of her podcast, Longworth transports listeners to the New Hollywood— a time when filmmakers like Coppola and Eastwood were about to take power, just as Golden Age mainstays like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock (among the subjects this season) felt the ground shift beneath them, or even crack open to swallow them whole. Longworth says she nearly titled this season 'Late Style,' but instead selected the more evocative 'The Old Man Is Still Alive,' sourced from an interview quote by George Cukor. 'The season gave me a chance to watch a lot of movies from directors I love that I hadn't seen yet,' Longworth says. The host is speaking over a Zoom call from London, where she is introducing a British Film Institute screening series tied to 'The Old Man Is Still Alive.' Selections include Henry Hathaway's Western 'True Grit,' which won John Wayne an Oscar at the age of 62, and Cukor's little-seen final film 'Rich and Famous,' a Candice Bergen-Jacqueline Bisset two-hander that Longworth likes much more than Cukor's Oscar winner 'My Fair Lady' (more on that later.) The American Cinematheque in Los Angeles is hosting a similar series beginning in May. There's a bit of a dark running joke to 'The Old Man Is Still Alive.' Each episode ends with an account of its subject's death before immediately, ruthlessly cutting to credits. Longworth broke that format for her two-part finale on John Huston, whose uneven, unwieldy final stretch include masterpieces like 'Fat City,' an Oscar darling in 'Prizzi's Honor' and unexpected money grabs like 'Annie' — all helmed by Huston as his health declined. Unlike the season's other subjects, who largely stopped working years before their deaths, Huston was prolific through his later life. His final feature, conveniently titled 'The Dead' and starring his daughter Anjelica, was released after he died in 1987. 'At first, everybody was like, 'Well, I guess he was a fraud. He made 'Maltese Falcon' and 'African Queen,' but he's lost it.' Then everybody starts changing their mind around 'Fat City' in the '70s,' Longworth says. 'Then by 2011, it had swung the other way to, 'Well, maybe he wasn't so great.' I cut out something at the end of that episode. There was a biography of Huston called 'Courage and Art.' I had ended the episode with a review that spent the first five paragraphs being like, 'I'm not sure there was any courage here, and I'm not sure there was art.'' Indeed, all the directors featured on 'The Old Man Is Still Alive' faced brutal pans — some uncalled for, some richly deserved. American film critics were beginning to adopt a more adversarial philosophy, influenced by the auteur theory calcified in Cahiers du cinéma magazine. The new approach came just in time to celebrate Golden Age filmmakers while they were still alive — and also, in many cases, to decry their latest works as out of touch. Even Huston, who had recent commercial hits and Oscar attention right before his death, was first remembered by his earlier films in his New York Times obituary. Are filmmakers more often defined by the work they do at younger ages? 'That may or may not be true, but this season is dedicated to showing why it shouldn't be in every case. And the related thing is Quentin Tarantino's pledge of, 'I have to retire before I get old, because old men don't make good movies.' I hope this season is a counterpoint to that argument,' Longworth says, then adding. 'I just don't believe that Quentin Tarantino is not going to make a movie in his sixties.' First of all, it's not like 'Beau Is Afraid' is easier to make than 'Juror #2.' It's not like there aren't younger people who aren't making movies that are highly ambitious and very strange. The other thing I would say is that — in terms of having to find their own financing — that happened to a lot of these old men as well. Something that is underdiscussed, about how we got from the studio system to the new Hollywood back to a new studio system, is this period in the early '60s where the studios technically still existed, but they were outsourcing to independent producers. Guys like Vincente Minnelli had a hard time navigating that new world; they were expected to put together packages, find financing, find stars. The studio system used to do this stuff for them. I hadn't really thought about that, but it became so evident in the research. And it's one of the things that makes the season relevant to today, because technology has completely changed how movies get financed, made and distributed. There's no grand design, really. It happens when I'm moved to say something about a specific film, usually that I want to champion. And sometimes it's negative, especially when it's something like 'My Fair Lady.' George Cukor is somebody that has made four or five masterpieces. For this to be the one to get the institutional attention — that's a crime. When I get angry about something, I slip into film critic mode. Not that many more were considered, because not that many fit into the basic parameters. They had to have a meaningful start in Hollywood in the '20s, '30s or '40s, and they had to still be working in the '60s, '70s and '80s. I considered Anthony Mann, but there wasn't enough of a change and he didn't work very late. I considered Robert Wise, but a lot of the Robert Wise movies that I'm passionate about were from the first half of his career. I wasn't very well-equipped to talk about 'Star Trek: The Movie.' I considered Elia Kazan, but I've talked about him on the podcast when I did an episode on Barbara Loden. I mean, did we really need to hear my thoughts on 'Sound of Music' when I have so many thoughts about 'My Fair Lady'? I hadn't and that is not a film that a 44-year-old should see for the first time. For the episode, I had written a passage about how I don't know that I'd love 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' if I saw it for the first time today. I'll never be able to completely dismiss it because I had this emotional relationship to it when I was becoming a teenager, idolizing Audrey Hepburn for being so beautiful and glamorous. But I can't step into the brain of a child when it comes to 'My Fair Lady.' It's not enough for me that she starts wearing dresses halfway through. I always tell people if you haven't seen 'Birth of a Nation' — don't. You'll get what you need to get out of it from reading intelligent writing about it. It's so grueling to watch. I don't do illegal downloading; I just don't know how. I prefer to pay for things if there's any way to do that. So I buy a lot of DVDs, sometimes importing. If I absolutely can't find something, there is the Russian streaming site, but I feel bad even linking to it. That's how I was able to see this Henry Hathaway movie 'The Witching Hour,' which is terrific. I hope that somebody restores it and makes it available. I don't know about more than the others. It's more that I started doing this show in 2014 and things have changed quite a bit in terms of the way people watch movies since then. Nothing makes me angrier than when people say, 'Everything's available on the internet.' I'm a big proponent of continuing to have physical media in your life. I mean, well this is breaking news, but I'm going back to school to study film preservation. One of the things that made me want to do that is the experience that I have as a film historian struggling to see things. You can rent John Ford's '7 Women' on Apple in the worst transfer I've ever seen. The fact that John Ford — who any cinephile would consider one of the most important directors of all time — his final movie just looks like garbage is a travesty. I'd like to be a small part of that change. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week What's Coming to Disney+ in April 2025 The Best Celebrity Memoirs to Read This Year: From Chelsea Handler to Anthony Hopkins
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Yahoo
Neighbour of dismembered couple unknowingly ‘offered to help move suitcase' full of body parts
A neighbour of the couple whose dismembered remains were found in a suitcase on Clifton Suspension Bridge said she unknowingly offered to help the accused killer move the trunk down the stairs. Yostin Andres Mosquera, 35, is alleged to have killed Albert Alfonso, 62, and Paul Longworth, 71, on July 8 last year. Jurors at the Old Bailey had previously been shown footage of Mosquera allegedly stabbing Mr Alfonso to death during an extreme sex session at his flat in Shepherd's Bush, west London. He is said to have killed Mr Longworth earlier that evening by hitting him on the head with a hammer. The Colombian then allegedly cut the bodies up and took their remains to Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol on July 10. Officers found body parts inside two large suitcases. One of the suitcases had a tag linking it to an address on Scotts Road, Shepherd's Bush. Officers found the heads of Mr Longworth and Mr Alfonso inside a chest freezer at the address. On Friday, a neighbour, who appeared behind a screen to conceal her identity from Mosquera, told the court how she heard loud banging noises on the stairs of the apartment complex. She went to investigate and found a man carrying an extremely heavy suitcase downstairs. She said: 'I started off by hearing a very loud noise in the stairwell, there was scraping, banging noises, the stairs are stone and the noise was extremely loud, like someone was dragging a heavy object step by step. 'Having heard the noise, I entered the stairwell, assuming one of my neighbours needed help with something heavy. 'I saw a man with a large case, standing over the case... To me he looked startled.' Asked how she responded, the neighbour said: 'As he was coming out of my friend's neighbour's house, I assumed he was a friend of theirs. I offered to help him carry the suitcase downstairs, it was clearly very heavy and I did not see anybody else around to help. 'He did not accept my offer, he looked worried and said sorry. 'I said, 'It's okay, I don't mind the noise, I just wanted to check if you wanted help with that'.' She added: 'I got the impression I wasn't wanted and I went back inside.' The neighbour said she had never seen the man in question before but recognised him a few days later when his face was in the press. Jurors were told by the neighbour that Mr Alfonso and Mr Longworth were 'very good neighbours' and she described the relationship of the pair as 'loving', 'supportive', 'harmonious' and 'touching'. Mosquera, of no fixed address, admits one count of manslaughter but denies the murders of Mr Alfonso and Mr Longworth. The trial continues. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Telegraph
Neighbour of dismembered couple unknowingly ‘offered to help move suitcase' full of body parts
A neighbour of the couple whose dismembered remains were found in a suitcase on Clifton Suspension Bridge said she unknowingly offered to help the accused killer move the trunk down the stairs. Yostin Andres Mosquera, 35, is alleged to have killed Albert Alfonso, 62, and Paul Longworth, 71, on July 8 last year. Jurors at the Old Bailey had previously been shown footage of Mosquera allegedly stabbing Mr Alfonso to death during an extreme sex session at his flat in Shepherd's Bush, west London. He is said to have killed Mr Longworth earlier that evening by hitting him on the head with a hammer. The Colombian then allegedly cut the bodies up and took their remains to Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol on July 10. Officers found body parts inside two large suitcases. One of the suitcases had a tag linking it to an address on Scotts Road, Shepherd's Bush. Officers found the heads of Mr Longworth and Mr Alfonso inside a chest freezer at the address. On Friday, a neighbour, who appeared behind a screen to conceal her identity from Mosquera, told the court how she heard loud banging noises on the stairs of the apartment complex. She went to investigate and found a man carrying an extremely heavy suitcase downstairs. She said: 'I started off by hearing a very loud noise in the stairwell, there was scraping, banging noises, the stairs are stone and the noise was extremely loud, like someone was dragging a heavy object step by step. 'Having heard the noise, I entered the stairwell, assuming one of my neighbours needed help with something heavy. 'I saw a man with a large case, standing over the case... To me he looked startled.' Asked how she responded, the neighbour said: 'As he was coming out of my friend's neighbour's house, I assumed he was a friend of theirs. I offered to help him carry the suitcase downstairs, it was clearly very heavy and I did not see anybody else around to help. 'He did not accept my offer, he looked worried and said sorry. 'I said, 'It's okay, I don't mind the noise, I just wanted to check if you wanted help with that'.' She added: 'I got the impression I wasn't wanted and I went back inside.' The neighbour said she had never seen the man in question before but recognised him a few days later when his face was in the press. Jurors were told by the neighbour that Mr Alfonso and Mr Longworth were 'very good neighbours' and she described the relationship of the pair as 'loving', 'supportive', 'harmonious' and 'touching'. Mosquera, of no fixed address, admits one count of manslaughter but denies the murders of Mr Alfonso and Mr Longworth. The trial continues.
BBC News
30-04-2025
- BBC News
Double murder accused filmed sex first
A man murdered a couple, dismembered their bodies and then froze some of their remains before taking the rest in suitcases to the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, a court has Andres Mosquera filmed himself having sex with Albert Alfonso, 62, and stabbed him to death, having earlier killed Paul Longworth, 71, the prosecution Mosquera, 35, denies the murder of both men at their flat in Shepherd's Bush, west London, between 8 and 10 July last admitted the manslaughter of Mr Alfonso during a hearing at the Old Bailey on Tuesday, however the prosecution rejected this plea. This article contains material that some people may find distressing. The court heard the defendant told a cyclist who had stopped to ask if he was lost that he had car parts inside a large red suitcase and a large silver Heer KC, prosecuting, told the court the suitcases contained the decapitated and dismembered bodies of Mr Longworth and Mr body parts were found by police in a chest freezer at their flat in Shepherd's Longworth had been attacked with a hammer to the back of his head and Mr Alfonso had been repeatedly stabbed, the court pair were in a long-term relationship and a year before their death, had entered into a civil partnership together, the prosecution told the Jury. Internet searches The court heard the defendant and another man, known under a pseudonym as James Smith, were both paid by Mr Afonso to perform degrading sexual acts which were often filmed and posted court heard there were also times when the victims and the defendant went on trips prosecution alleges Mr Mosquera killed both men on 8 July 2024 at their home in Shepherd's Bush, killing Mr Longworth first and then hiding his body in the storage section of Mr Longworth's court also heard the defendant had searched on the internet for the value of the victims' Mosquera, a Colombian national, sat in the dock and listened to proceedings with the help of an trial continues.
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Dead white men are what I'm legitimately interested in': podcaster Karina Longworth on the forgotten work of Hollywood titans
'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.' So runs the most famous line from John Ford's elegiac 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The 44-year-old historian Karina Longworth has other ideas. The former LA Weekly film critic launched her podcast, You Must Remember This, in 2014, setting out to tell 'the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century', as she puts it in the show's introduction. Its title is lifted from the jazz standard As Time Goes By ('You must remember this / A kiss is still a kiss …') as featured in Casablanca. Hearing that wistful, timeworn lyric, it is easy to overlook the imperative hiding in plain sight. With each fastidiously researched and gloriously entertaining episode, Longworth seems to be telling us: you must remember this. To not do so, or to allow fact to curdle into legend, would be unconscionable. 'I don't want to be a schoolmarm scolding people for forgetting,' she says from a sunny upstairs room in the Los Angeles home she shares with her husband, Rian Johnson, director of the Knives Out whodunnits and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. 'But I think we can only understand where we are at and where we're going if we look to where we've been.' One reason she steers clear of modern topics on the podcast is the possible conflict of interest with her husband's career. Jamie Lee Curtis's appearance in the original Knives Out, for instance, precluded Longworth from ever making an episode about that actor's parents, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, even though they would be ideal subjects. As if further evidence were needed of her passion for the past, a framed poster of Marcel Pagnol's 1936 melodrama César dominates the wall behind her today. Later, she will dismiss several questions about modern Hollywood with the same bored riposte: 'I don't care about new movies.' That was one of the reasons she hung up her pen at the LA Weekly in 2012. Shortly before quitting, she mocked James Bond's backstory in Skyfall as his 'formative sads' and wrote the film off as 'Downton Abbey with cybercrime and shower sex'. She dismissed Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris as 'a Bill and Ted sequel for cultural studies majors', and said Joss Whedon was 'crippled by his short-term need to please the crowd' in the first Avengers movie. Film criticism's loss is cinema history's gain. Over 11 years of You Must Remember This, Longworth has covered in granular, invigorating detail everything from the anti-communist blacklist to the influence of Charles Manson and the Hollywood phenomenon of the dead blonde. She is a factchecker par excellence – a full 19 episodes were devoted to clearing up the scurrilous, spiteful untruths in Kenneth Anger's gossip bible Hollywood Babylon. She is also the ally any neglected genius would want on their side, as proved by her season on the late Polly Platt, a largely unsung figure in the careers of Peter Bogdanovich and Wes Anderson. The latest series, The Old Man Is Still Alive, addresses the declining years of 14 cinematic titans, among them Vincente Minnelli, whose visually groundbreaking The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sparked the idea for the season after Longworth saw it in Paris on a rainy Saturday evening in 2023. 'It's from the early 1960s but it feels proto-psychedelic. Seeing it reminded me why I started the podcast: to talk about things that have been forgotten.' With that in mind, she gives us the Hitchcock not of Vertigo and Psycho but of the astringent Frenzy and the meandering Family Plot; the John Ford of Cheyenne Autumn, a well-meaning if not wholly effective critique of the western's values; and the Billy Wilder drawn back to the mournful territory of Sunset Boulevard in Fedora. It's fascinating to hear Longworth charting the corkscrew turns these film-makers took as they twisted themselves out of shape trying to keep up with the times. But there's no escaping the fact that she has taken on a supremely unfashionable topic: dead white men. A deliberate provocation? 'No, it's what I'm legitimately interested in,' she scoffs. 'My podcast is really hard to make. I can only do it if I care about the subject. Sure, in the world right now there is anger at specific older white men. Part of it is an impulse to say: 'We should just burn it all down and start again.' But history makes us who we are today.' As a student, she was taught the importance of DW Griffith, the director of The Birth of a Nation. 'There was only a cursory conversation around whether the film was racist,' she recalls. 'It was primarily all about the technique. I don't think that's the way to do it either, but nor do I think we should burn all copies of The Birth of a Nation. That sets a dangerous precedent.' The phrase 'institutional memory' crops up in the new series, and it is this, along with the nuance of considered investigation over kneejerk reaction, that Longworth is fighting to defend. That said, people today are time-poor and inundated with viewing options. With the BFI Southbank hosting a month-long series of the movies covered in the podcast, some of which Longworth will be introducing in person, how does she think potential audiences will respond to the invitation to sample, say, The Only Game in Town, starring Warren Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor? By her own admission, it is 'the least successful of the George Stevens films I've seen, [though] aesthetically it has its moments'. Hardly a ringing endorsement. 'I don't care,' she shrugs. 'I'm not trying to change the paradigm. I'm just reacting to movies the way I react to them.' Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion By and large, the age of 60 is the point at which these figures, many of whom began their careers in the silent era, 'got weird' as they struggled to adapt to cultural changes. When I suggest that ageism is no longer as prevalent now that Martin Scorsese is revered at 82, while Ridley Scott is whooshing along like a runaway train at 87, she disagrees vehemently. 'Look at Megalopolis and the way Coppola was treated as if he was a doddering old man foolishly spending his family's legacy. Even with Scorsese, there's this sense of: 'Aw, the old man is trying to do something else before he dies!' And that's the positive spin. The negative one is: 'Why won't he just make shorter movies?'' Along with erudition and tireless research, listeners of You Must Remember This get Longworth's shimmering writing (on William Wyler's How to Steal a Million: 'Dressed in a slip, a car coat and rain boots, Audrey Hepburn invents grunge') and plenty of shade (to anyone defending Otto Preminger's last film, The Human Factor, she says: 'You do you, babe'). It's all delivered in her alluring conspiratorial tones, which suggest a film noir schemer. Or, as one online fan put it, 'a sexy ghost'. When I ask how this exaggerated vocal style evolved from the chattier early episodes, she looks unimpressed. 'I'm not trying to do anything differently,' she says. One indisputable change in the new season is that, to adapt TS Eliot and Charles Dickens, she do the directors in different voices. Whereas she once hired actors, even enlisting her husband to play John Huston, she now takes on every role herself, including an amusing Hitchcock with a severe case of irritable vowel syndrome. Does this have anything to do with her own background as a would-be child actor in LA? 'I'm not acting,' she says firmly. 'I'm doing what I would do if I were telling these stories at a cocktail party.' It was her mother who steered her into auditions as a child. 'She wanted to be an artist and a model. When she had me, she stopped pursuing work outside of the house. That was not the right decision for her, and she killed herself when I was 11. She was in a situation common to many people of her generation: they had been told to want something and then, when they got it, it wasn't fulfilling and they didn't know what to do about that.' Longworth's acting career was short-lived. 'I had trouble controlling my body and my face. A lot of that came from nervousness at being looked at. I still don't like it. The podcast is the only way I can be free to do any kind of performance because nobody's watching.' Channelling Greta Garbo and providing our conversation with a natural end, she says: 'I want to be alone.' You Must Remember This Presents … The Old Man is Still Alive is at BFI Southbank, London SE1, until 30 April
